Lieberman pressures 2nd firm to take down WikiLeaks-related material

The New York Times reports that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) pressured Tableau, a Seattle company that allows Web users to post charts, to remove several charts describing the release of WikiLeaks material. The company removed the charts on Thursday, following the lead of Amazon, which had taken down the WikiLeaks documents themselves.

The twist: The charts were not produced by WikiLeaks, but by a freelance journalist. And they contained no classified or secret material. The charts merely depicted how many times each country, or topic, was discussed in the cables.

In other words, the charts were journalism. (There's a vigorous debate whether or not the WikiLeaks releases themselves are journalism, as WikiLeaks casts them. These charts seem to be within anyone's definition.)

Commentator Glenn Greenwald issues a take-down notice to Lieberman on Salon: "Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to 'all companies' that is causing suppression of political information."